{"id":108772,"date":"2014-02-26T16:29:35","date_gmt":"2014-02-26T16:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=108772"},"modified":"2014-02-26T16:30:35","modified_gmt":"2014-02-26T16:30:35","slug":"david-miranda-ruling-attack-press-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/david-miranda-ruling-attack-press-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"The David Miranda ruling and the attack on press freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Julie Hyland\u00a0<\/strong>
\nRINF Alternative News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

To appreciate in full the deeply reactionary import of the ruling that David Miranda was detained lawfully at Heathrow airport last August, one need only cite some of the arguments marshalled by the High Court in London.<\/p>\n

The formulations employed by Lord Justice Laws, Mr. Justice Ouseley and Mr. Justice Openshaw in their judgement last Wednesday go far beyond this one incident\u2013itself an unprecedented assault on journalistic freedom. They point to the outlawing of any notion of a \u201cfree press.\u201d On the spurious grounds of \u201canti-terrorism\u201d and \u201cnational security\u201d, no one is safe from the reach of a British state determined to cover up its crimes and legitimise those yet to come.<\/p>\n

Miranda is the partner of Glenn Greenwald, a former\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0journalist and close associate of National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower Edward Snowden. He had been in Berlin with filmmaker Laura Poitras, who collaborated with Greenwald on his disclosures of mass spying by the NSA and Britain\u2019s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). He was en route to Brazil when he was detained by the Metropolitan Police for nine hours and his laptop, phone and encrypted storage devices were seized under the Terrorism Act 2000.<\/p>\n

This legislation was enacted by the Labour government of Tony Blair. It permits police to detain any individual at UK borders and confiscate their possessions, even if there is no suspicion of criminal activity. Miranda\u2019s detention marks the first time the Act\u2019s provisions have been used to seize journalistic material.<\/p>\n

Miranda challenged this as unlawful on the grounds that the Act was used improperly and the actions of the police constituted disproportionate interference with his right to freedom of expression, as defined by the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).<\/p>\n

The High Court acknowledged his arrest \u201cconstituted an indirect interference with press freedom,\u201d but ruled that this was warranted by \u201cvery pressing\u201d interests of national security.<\/p>\n

[product id=”” sku=”js07″]The subordination of fundamental democratic rights to an omnipotent state runs as a constant thread through the ruling.<\/p>\n

Greenwald had submitted that \u201cnot to publish material simply because a government official has said such publication may be damaging to national security is antithetical to the most important traditions of responsible journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lord Laws dismissed this as \u201ctrue but trivial.\u201d Journalists have no \u201cconstitutional responsibility\u201d as regards matters of national security, he ruled, and could not know the whole \u201cjigsaw\u201d of intelligence information. They are therefore unable to judge whether disclosure of certain information could endanger \u201clife or security.\u201d<\/p>\n

Making clear that only the state could make such a judgement, the High Court deferred to the submissions of British cabinet minister Oliver Robbins, deputy national security adviser, and the police.<\/p>\n

As regards improper use of the Terrorism Act, the court stated that Miranda was \u201cnot a journalist\u201d and that \u201cthe stolen GCHQ intelligence material he was carrying was not \u2018journalistic material\u2019, or if it was, only in the weakest sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was only one of numerous references to \u201cstolen\u201d material, which in the Orwellian world of modern-day Britain refers not to the material illegally gathered and hoarded by the NSA\/GCHQ, but to Snowden\u2019s exposure of such activities.<\/p>\n

Laws stated as regards press freedoms and national security that in \u201cthis case, the balance is plainly in favour of the latter.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition, the High Court ruled that it was not necessary for the police to suspect someone as a terrorist to detain and confiscate his possessions, only to decide that he \u201cappears to be\u201d. According to Justice Ouseley, under the Terrorism Act a police officer can act, for example, on \u201cno more than hunch or intuition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laws accepted that the real purpose of Miranda\u2019s detention was to \u201cascertain the nature\u201d of the material he was carrying and \u201cto neutralise the effects of its release (or further release) or dissemination\u201d, and that this \u201cfell properly\u201d under the 2000 Act.<\/p>\n

No \u201chunch\u201d was involved in the decision to detain Miranda. The High Court heard evidence that the security services had been monitoring both Miranda and Greenwald before the arrest and had sent three requests to border police over several days to ensure Miranda was detained. The final request stated chillingly that the planned disclosure of the material Miranda was thought to be carrying\u00a0\u201c<\/em>\u00a0is designed to influence a government, and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The High Court ruling effectively criminalises not only investigative journalism and whistle-blowing, but also anyone who receives such information\u2013in this case the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0newspaper. It means that security services responsible for falsifying \u201cintelligence\u201d to justify a pre-emptive war on Iraq, involved in extraordinary rendition and torture, and caught carrying out mass illegal surveillance can brand someone about to expose their criminal actions as a \u201cterrorist,\u201d to be held by police and have their possessions seized.<\/p>\n

There are no exceptions and the police do not have to justify their actions. All it requires is the say-so of a government minister and the security services. There is no defence of holding journalistic material or freedom of expression.<\/p>\n

Lord Laws dismissed the need to place \u201cany reliance on the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights,\u201d declaring that English common law was sufficient. It should be noted that it was also Lord Laws who ruled in 2004 that there was no \u201cprinciple [that] prohibits the Secretary of State from relying\u201d on evidence obtained by torture overseas.<\/p>\n

It is for good reason that Greenwald drew the comparison between the UK\u2019s assertion that the release of the Snowden documents is tantamount to \u201cterrorism\u201d and the way the same argument is \u201cnow being used by the Egyptian military regime to prosecute Al Jazeera journalists as terrorists.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Britain, as in Egypt, the bourgeoisie recognises that its economic order, based on pervasive and growing social inequality, is unviable and faces massive popular opposition. Just the day before the High Court ruling on Miranda, students at the University of Glasgow in Scotland voted to elect Snowden as rector of the University.<\/p>\n

The High Court arguments make plain that Miranda\u2019s detention was not a \u201cmisuse\u201d of the Terrorism Act. Rather, the Terrorism Act was conceived as an instrument of state intimidation, with the purpose of waging war on democratic rights and repressing political opposition.<\/p>\n

The historical implications are far-reaching. The Gestapo had such powers. Under the guise of the \u201cwar on terror\u201d, Britain\u2019s ruling elite have established their own political police force, equivalent to that of Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Julie Hyland\u00a0 RINF Alternative News To appreciate in full the deeply reactionary import of the ruling that David Miranda was detained lawfully at Heathrow airport last August, one need only cite some of the arguments marshalled by the High Court in London. The formulations employed by Lord Justice Laws, Mr. Justice Ouseley and Mr. Justice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107788,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-108772","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}